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Professor Mark Meier of the University of Colorado says scientists have seriously underestimated the rise in sea levels that will occur this century. His team came to this conclusion by examining the rate at which glaciers and ice caps are melting because of rising temperatures on Earth.

They say these areas to be retreating far faster than previously thought, and the run-off waters will lift the height of the oceans well above that recently predicted by the UN?s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. ?The glacier wastage at the moment is unprecedented,? Meier says. ?In some glaciers, like the South Cascade Glacier in Washington that I have studied for years, we know that the present rate of melting is greater than it ever has been for the last 5,000 years.?
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One day, a giant wave, 425 feet high, traveling 125 mph, could crash into Sydney, Australia, wipe out the beaches of California or drench the golf courses of northeast Scotland. Mega-tsunamis have happened in the past, and no coastline in the world is safe, says Edward Bryant of Wollongong University in Australia.

He has found signs that giant waves swept over Australia, California and the Scottish coastline in the past and believes it could happen again. ?I believe St. Andrews golf course [in Scotland] is a tsunami deposit,? says Bryant.
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Whitley Strieber published his novel “The Last Vampire” last year and has just completed the sequel, “Lilith’s Dream,” which will be published in October. Despite all this vampire writing, we never thought that vampires might be real, but recent news reports tell a different story. Police say up to 50 groups of human vampires are operating in Bogota, Columbia.

They dress in black and drink brandy mixed with human blood, which they obtain from transfusion centers or by purchasing animal blood from butchers.

But police are worried that their activities have escalated: they have recently begun stopping people at gunpoint and mugging them for their blood. They force them to bare their necks, then pierce their veins with a razor and take turns drinking the blood.read more

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A team of scientists at the Rowland Institute in Massachusetts, led by Prof Lene Hau, have succeeded in making a pulse of laser light slow down to a complete halt. Then, after about a thousandth of a second, they made it start up again as if nothing had happened. This breakthrough will be important for designing the supercomputers of the future.

Other scientists, at Stanford University and the University of Colorado, have worked on similar techniques, and a group at Texas A & M University hopes to not only stop light, but reverse its direction.
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